Rimbaud called Charles Baudelaire 'le premier voyant, roi des poetes, un vrai dieu'. The history of modern poetry begins with him. This is a comprehensive translation of all Baudelaire's poetry, excluding only juvenilia, occasional verse and work of doubtful attribution. Baudelaire contemplated a volume of poems that would 'launch him into the future like a cannon-ball'. Here it is in vivid and formally authoritative translation.